"Both work," Marcus said.
They sat until the light went amber. On the way home, Shadow stopped to smell a patch of weeds with the thoroughness of a creature who understood that smelling was a way of claiming more life. Marcus waited without rushing him. Jasmine waited too. The waiting had become a language.
Shadow died on a Thursday in November, three years after the shelter. He was sixteen. The end was not dramatic. It was a slowing, a refusal of food, a night when his legs would not hold him and his eyes asked a question Marcus had been dreading. Dr. Patel came to the house. Jasmine held Shadow's head. Marcus held his paws. When it was over, the quiet in the room was a different quiet from the one in the apartment on the day of the homecoming — not absence as betrayal, but absence as completion. They buried him under the oak in the yard with a stone that said only his name and the years: SHADOW, 13 YEARS OF LOYALTY BEFORE WE COUNTED, AND EVERY YEAR AFTER.
Marcus did not speak much for a week. Jasmine did not try to fill the silence with comfort that would have been noise. She cooked. She went to work. She came home and sat with him on the porch where Shadow used to lie. On the eighth day, Marcus said, "I keep expecting him at the door."
"I know," Jasmine said.
"When you took him to the shelter, I thought the worst thing that could happen was losing him there. But this — this was always going to happen. I just wanted every day until it did."
"You got them," she said. "We got them. Because you went to kennel twelve. Because you didn't let my worst day be his last day."